


You Think You Love Her

by labyrinthineRetribution



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Denial of Feelings, F/F, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Humanstuck, POV Second Person, Pining, i was absolutely listening to night vale while writing this sfkjsdfsaf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-07-08 00:54:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19860883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/labyrinthineRetribution/pseuds/labyrinthineRetribution
Summary: Rose suspects that her new neighbor might be of the eldritch variety. More importantly, she might be a little into that.





	You Think You Love Her

**Author's Note:**

> i turned this into my 9th grade english teacher for a grade and she made the whole grade level read it for an assignment. take that however you will

It is, at the present moment, 3:12 AM. You lie awake in your bed. The house is still, empty. Your mind is anything but. 

Your room is dark, cool. It’s around 80 degrees outside, the kind of heat that submerges you and steals the breath from your lungs. It's the kind of heat that makes you shudder in its awful warmth. It's hot, but it is cold, infeeling, directionless. You’ve managed to steal most of your friends portable air conditions to combat this evil that threatens to strangle you in your sleep. You despise this dry Arizona heat. 

Your mind drifts back to the apartment across the hall. More specifically, the woman who lives there. Also her dog, who is really cute, but more importantly the woman herself. 

She intrigues you to no end. She moved into your complex a few months ago, moving truck so loaded up with so much flora it looked like its own ecosystem. Her massive, tangled nest of curly black hair was pulled back out of her face and her glasses glistened and shone in the late afternoon light of the early summer sun. She had a long face and a wide smile. The kind of smile the suggest the idea of friendship, but also communicates years of crippling isolation. You wanted to study that smile forever.

Your close neighbor and closer friend John had helped her get moved in. You had watched from your doorway. John’s description of her had been more or less ‘esoteric’, though that’s not the word he would have used. But it’s the word you used. She is an enigma to you, a Christmas present placed weeks in advance under the tree, enticing you with what lies beneath the colorful wrapping paper and fanciful bow.

You had seen her around town since then, but in a town with a population of about a 5,000 people, you couldn't really avoid her, even if you wanted to. She would pop up at coffee shops or bookstores or the Walmart supercenter. You would do a once over of each other, nod, smile, and move on. Continue with your day, your routine. But now you can’t just continue with your routine. She’s in your head, like the melody of an old song, impossible to name but beyond forgettable. 

It was now 3:32 in the morning. Soon it wouldn’t be three, it would be four, then six, then you would get up and continue with your day, your life. But right now, in this instant, everything is still, silent.

You combat this maddening sense of peace and serenity by getting up to make some coffee.You should be working. Your movements should always have a direction, a purpose. Every moment spent lying in bed thinking about mystery girls is another moment you aren’t doing much of anything. You can’t do that.

You don’t necessarily have to turn on the lights in your house, you know this place like the back of your hand, but even hands can grow new spots and calluses and you would prefer not to trip over some sort of abandoned knitting project or old journal in the dead of night. It's much hotter in your living room, with the lack of any sort of central cooling system and your refusal to open any windows, for fear of cicadas and other such creepy crawlies. All the fans in your house are currently taking respite in your room.  
Your mind innocently wanders back to your neighbor. She had recently offered you some homemade bug spray for your house. You had never mentioned any bug problems to her, but it wouldn’t be too strange to assume she had just made an educated guess, what with the dry heat and the lousy upkeep of these complexes. You had often gotten a certain vibe from her, like she knew more than she was letting on. She never had to ask directions or ask for help, the flow of it all just came naturally to her, despite being new in town. Maybe it was just you. Maybe you were the one who couldn’t talk to people without putting up barriers. Yep, definitely you. 

As you take out your half-empty, dollar store coffee, a sharp knock from the front door rings out and breaks the silence. It's 3:45 in the morning. Someone wants to talk to you at 3:45 in the morning. You let out a deep sigh and shuffle over to your door.

It’s her. Her hair is wild and her eyes are dull and bleary and her smile is tired but there’s something about her that just crackles energy.

“Hi Rose!”

“Jade.”

“You look tired.”

“I am.”

“Well that won’t do. Coffee?”

You look at her hands. In one is some sort of foamy, sugary monstrosity that no mere mortal could consume and live to tell the tale. In the other...that miserable shrew.

“Is that dark roast?”

“I had a feeling you might like it.”

“Is this going to be some sort of ‘thing’ with you? A sort of theme of the week? Premonitions and whatnot? Because I have a feeling it might get pretty stale very quickly.”  
“Well, I don’t know if you’re going to let me inside or not…”

“Please, come in, I would hate to be responsible for your impending heat stroke.”

She is now in your house. She is on your couch, futon, it's a futon don’t lie, and sitting on your blanket and occupying the same space as you and is sipping that horrific concoction. You take a seat on the ottoman.

“How can you stomach that swill? I can feel my arteries clogging just looking at it.”

“You’re one to talk, that coffees so bitter and rich it looks like they just skipped the middle man and put the dirt the beans came in into the machine.”  
She winks. You blush.

"I like my coffee like I like my nights: dark, endless, and impossible to sleep through. Speaking of which, how did you know I was awake?"  
“Who among us could sleep in this heat?”

You shrug, not taking your eyes off her. A non committal answer. The kind that would satisfy most and leave others searching for more.

“I just find hard to believe that you, specifically, would visit me, specifically, at this time of night.”

“You don’t understand much about this world, do you?”

“Excuse me?” 

“We like to believe we understand how this world functions, how it moves. But so much of it is obscured, just out of reach. When you look at the big picture, we haven’t seen much of anything have we? We understand so much, but the sky behind those lights-- mostly void, partially stars-- that sky reminds us we don't understand even more."

You don’t understand her. As time waned on, you would realize you couldn’t begin to understand her. In fact, you couldn’t understand much of anything. But you could enjoy it. You could enjoy what you didn’t understand and you could enjoy the way she made you feel. That electric feeling that rocked you from the soles of your feet to the roots of your hair and everywhere in between. You would learn that you didn’t care that you didn’t get certain things, and there would be times that you wished you had never learned certain things. But in this moment, she intrigued you. You wanted to learn everything you could about the woman on your mediocre futon in your sweltering apartment in this crumbling town. You wanted to unlock her secrets, like discovering that your mother's name is not, in fact, ‘mommy.’ You wanted to be confused by her, you wanted to be frustrated by her, you wanted to fear her.

But right now, in this moment, at four in the morning, you think you wanted to love her.

**Author's Note:**

> You're welcome.


End file.
